Entomology.

Most modern insects possess wings and can fly. The evolutionary development of wings and flight in insects, however, is obscure because of the lack of transitional forms between earlier wingless and later winged forms in the fossil record. To demonstrate a possible intermediate step in wing evolution, James H. Marden and Melissa G. Kramer of Pennsylvania State University investigated primitive aquatic insects called stoneflies that have wings but do not fly. Taeniopteryx burksi move across water by surface skimming, with the body supported by water but propelled forward by the wings. Allocapnia vivipara sail across water by raising their wings to catch the wind. In experiments comparing surface-skimming and sailing abilities in stoneflies having artificially shortened wings of various sizes, the researchers found that greater wing area generally resulted in greater speed. They proposed that ancestral stoneflies and other semiaquatic insects used gill structures to move across the water’s surface and that over time the advantages of faster surface skimming or sailing favoured an increase in the size of those structures, ultimately leading to wings and wing-powered flight.

The defensive behaviour with which some honeybees (genus Apis) respond to attacks by hornets may be an example of coevolution, according to a study carried out in Japan by Masato Ono and colleagues of Tamagawa University, Tokyo. Giant hornets (Vespa mandarinia japonica) make orchestrated attacks on other social hymenopterans such as honeybees, which they kill with their mandibles and feed to their larvae. The investigators confirmed that an individual giant hornet marks a bee colony with a pheromone (chemical attractant) from specialized glands. Additional giant hornets then congregate and initiate a slaughter attack. Introduced European honeybees (A. mellifera) appear defenseless against the hornets and are killed at rates as high as 40 per minute. Native Japanese honeybees (A. cerana japonica), however, can detect the hornet pheromone and change their behaviour by increasing the number of defending bees. More than 500 bees swarm around an attacking hornet, forming a ball whose internal temperature reaches 47° C (117° F), high enough to kill the hornet but not the bees. European bees seem unaware of the hornet pheromone and do not respond effectively to the hornet attacks. The differential responses of the two bee species suggest that the Japanese honeybees have coevolved with the predator and developed an effective defense.

The evolutionary history of symbiotic relationships between fungus-growing ants (tribe Attini) and their fungi was investigated by Ulrich G. Mueller and colleagues of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Using ribosomal DNA analysis and morphological characteristics to compare phylogenies, or evolutionary family trees, for the ants and their fungi, they concluded that whereas the ants originated from a single ancestral form, the cultivated fungi had more than one ancestral line, which indicated that ants developed symbiotic relationships with different fungal lineages. They also found that the less primitive, generally more specialized species, including the leaf-cutting ants, have been associated with the same fungal lineage for at least 23 million years. In a related study Mitchell Sogin of Woods Hole (Mass.) Marine Biological Laboratory and colleagues, using ribosomal RNA analysis, concluded that the less-primitive leaf-cutting ant species and their fungal symbionts have undergone long-term coevolution. A notable feature of the relationship that exists between ants and fungi is that one symbiont may be inconspicuous yet be essential to the survival of the other. Anne R. Gibbons

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